She wasn't wrong. On Sunday Brady's Patriots take on the New York Giants with the quarterback seeking the fourth Super Bowl win of his career. Succeeding would place him alongside his childhood idol, Joe Montana, as well as the former Pittsburgh Steelers great Terry Bradshaw as the only quarterbacks ever to achieve that feat.

Whether or not he was in need of this sort of assistance, of course, was a different matter. "He and his team worked so hard to get to this point and now they need us more than ever to send them positive energy so they can fulfill their dream of winning this Super Bowl," continued the message. "I kindly ask all of you to join me on this positive chain and pray for him, so he can feel confident, healthy and strong. Envision him happy and fulfilled experiencing with his team a victory this Sunday."

The rest of the world simply envisioned Brady cringing as word of this story got out. Although he had played no part in the creation of the email, it was he – living out this week in the already intense spotlight of a Super Bowl week – who would have to live with the ridicule. In a sport driven by testosterone and machismo, this was, the Post declared, "disgustingly soppy".

Then again, it's been a while since Tom Brady has fit neatly into the NFL mould. "Do you remember Tom Brady back when he was just a football player?" wrote Jason Schwartz in the opening line of a feature for ESPN The Magazine last October, going on to detail the Brady's ascent from athlete to transcendent cultural icon. Tom Brady no longer exists only on football fields but on billboards and the front pages of celebrity gossip magazines.

His team-mates readily acknowledge that, away from football, Brady moves in a different world. "How's Tom's life different to mine?" mused offensive tackle Matt Light, a player who has been with the Patriots through Brady's entire career as a starter – sharing in every Super Bowl trip, attending multiple Pro Bowls and earning tens of millions of dollars over his career – during a media session on Thursday. "You got a while? You got a full pad of paper there to write it down?"

Quarterback and supermodel. AP

Not that it makes them treat him any differently, of course. If entertainment journalists were swooning last month at the prospect of Brady and Gisele moving into their new $20m 'dream home' in Brentwood, Los Angeles, then the Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker seemed rather more taken with the couple's taste in bathroom furnishings. "You go over and use his toilet and you press this button and it sprays water on you," exclaimed Welker this week. "I'm like, 'You've got to be kidding me'… sometimes I just want to go over to his house and use the restroom."

When Light was asked on Thursday if there was any aspect of Brady's celebrity lifestyle that he was not keen on, his response was immediate. "The sweaters. His choice of sweaters," said the lineman. "I was going to wear one of his sweaters in here but I got in trouble yesterday for not following the rules so … It's more of a cardigan, by the way. With really nice designer buckles. It's kinda like Mr Rogers went to Hollywood. I worked out in one of those sweaters once and I didn't feel any better so I don't know what the big hype is."

Light has always known how to keep Brady on his toes. In an interview with the Guardian before Super Bowl XLII in 2008, the lineman explained in some detail how it came to be that Brady left training one day to find his car filled from floor to ceiling with peanuts. After talking his way through an entirely theoretical methodology of how said peanuts might have been transferred into the car – and how many might have been required – he noted with regret that the culprit remained a mystery.

The notion that Brady might be somehow untouchable – too important to be subjected to such teasing – is alien to Light because he still remembers the guy that Schwartz references in his ESPN the Magazine article, the one who was not only "just a football player" – and at the outset not even a particularly remarkable one. "He was a skinny guy, who drove a yellow jeep and lived in a small condo," said Light when asked for his first memories of his team-mate.

Faulk, drafted one year before Brady, echoed such words, noting: "He was a lot scrawnier." Not that you would need to take either of their words for it. The evidence is right there for everyone to see, never more strikingly than in a famous photo of Brady taken at the NFL's annual Scouting Combine – in Indianapolis, no less – shortly before he was drafted by the Patriots in 2000. Brady appears pasty, narrow-shouldered and if not unathletic then certainly nothing like the physical specimen he is today.

It is an important image, one which provides a stark reminder that he was not always what he is now. It is easy to imagine that Brady was a born superstar, always destined for the success and the lifestyle he has achieved. The reality is that he was anything but. As one scouting report dug up by CBS for a 60 Minutes episode on Brady in 2005 read: "Poor build, very skinny and narrow, lacks mobility and the ability to avoid the rush, lacks a really strong arm".

Drafted in the sixth round by the Patriots in 2000, Brady had not even enjoyed a full season as a starter at the college level. Through his final two years at the University of Michigan he was forced into an awkward job-share with Drew Henson: a multi-sport phenom who arrived in Brady's junior year with scouts already predicting a long and fruitful professional career in whichever path he chose between football and baseball. Only late in his senior year did Brady finally make the starting job his own.

It was precisely in those two years, however, that the Brady who would go on to rule the NFL emerged. Not from an athletic or technique standpoint – in both departments he still left much to be desired – but from those of mental discipline and resolve. Distraught at the thought of losing his final two years of college eligibility to this newcomer, Brady had briefly considered transferring but instead determined to stay and fight, training harder and watching more film than ever before.

And if that scouting report had missed out any one key attribute, it was the player's competitiveness – an attribute that applied not only to his football. "I've dropped elbows on [backgammon sets]," Brady told 60 Minutes, reacting to a team-mate's comments about his fits of rage after losing even at board games. Welker has recalled seeing his team-mate get so mad during a game that "I thought he was ready to throw it off the plane".

Table tennis can be similarly fraught – Deion Branch, another Patriots receiver, noting in 2010 that: "I beat him most of the time, but then he breaks the paddle and we can't play any more". "It really don't matter what the game is," said the running back Kevin Faulk this week. "He could be shooting pieces of paper in the trash can and he's still going to be just as competitive with it."

Anybody who has seen Brady play will know it's no different on game day. If the New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning – his adversary this Sunday at Super Bowl XLVI – can seem freakish in his cool-headedness then Brady is the other end of the spectrum. Missed throws are met with howls of frustration, turnovers with full-blown tantrums. Even winning is not always sufficient. After beating the Baltimore Ravens to reach this year's Super Bowl, the first words out of Brady's mouth as he stood on the podium were: "Well, I sucked pretty bad".

Competing was what he did, too, when he reached the NFL. Selected by the Patriots with the 199th overall pick, he had to battle hard just to secure a place as a reserve. "We already had three good quarterbacks and he came down the stairs, a skinny beanpole with a pizza box under his arm," recalled the Patriots owner Robert Kraft on Wednesday. "He came over and said: 'I'm Tom.' I said: 'I know who you are, you're Tom Brady, our sixth-round draft choice.' He looked me right in the eye and said: 'I'm the best decision this organisation has ever made.'"

Thrust into the starting line-up in his second season when the starter Drew Bledsoe went down hurt, he would win the Super Bowl that very same year. Even then there was no sense that Brady was a special talent. Yes, he would be named MVP of Super Bowl XXXVI, but that was largely secured on a single drive at the end of the game to put Adam Vinatieri in range for the field goal that sealed a 20-17 win over the St Louis Rams. He had thrown for just 145 yards and the touchdown pass he threw to David Patten in the second quarter of was his first of the entire postseason.

In a column early the next season, the Boston Globe's Bob Ryan was in no doubt that Brady "is, at best, a highly competent game manager". Alan Greenberg expressed a similar thought in the Hartford Courant: "Brady may look like a matinee idol, but he plays like a middle manager". Even after his second Super Bowl win two years later – a 32-29 victory over the Carolina Panthers in which Brady was again named MVP after again putting Vinatieri in range for the winning field goal in the game's dying moments – many refused to consider him one of the game's elite passers.

It is easy to look back now and scoff yet the reality is that they were not far wide of the mark. Brady was then a game manager – one who studied hard to ensure he would make good decisions on the field and keep his team in positions to win. He did not become the player he is now – widely recognised as one of the greatest of all-time at his position – overnight but through tiny, gradual increments: the fruit of hard work and a refusal to ever be satisfied.

Ask Brady which his favorite Super Bowl win is, and he will invariably give you the same answer: "the next one". Even if Gisele's "positive chain" does its job on Sunday, it is hard to believe that even matching Montana would make Brady feel fulfilled.